Let players sign up as “mod developers”. This will cost money (edit: no longer costs money! - see below), and

will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per mod team).

Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository.

As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.

Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers have access to this certificate.

The rules of the license deal will contain:

Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft

You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a separate license deal with us

The mods must not be malicious (obviously)

We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community.

In the long term, we hope this means people will do awesome new things with the Minecraft engine and play around with it. We want to buy and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them ourselves. It’s possible we might have a mod marketplace for selling and buying mods that fans have written, or we might purchase and integrate nice mods that fit the main theme of Minecraft.

Because of overwhelming feedback, the cost of the mod api access will be 0 dollars.Our intention wasn’t to make money off selling the access, only to ensure some level of quality. Obviously that wasn’t the most popular idea in the world.

ModDB's Thoughts

Great to see a commerical game really really think through it's modding strategy and realize the immense benefit robust modding tools and API can bring. We are going to see how closely we can work with Minecraft to provide mods with profiles containing image galleries / videos like they have on ModDB.

If you have to buy a mod its no longer a mod its a DLC, addon, or whatever you want to call it, like the Diplomacy DLC for Sins of a solar empire or Fallout 3 DLCs but this is still going to be awsome.

so pretty much this is to try get more money for a unfinished product? Mine craft isent that good anyway, What are u going to mod for starters maybe make the game more decent i guess considering it looks like its been made by a 2 year old.. or a German kid

you guys ever heard of maniac digger? its a open source project which is no different from Mine craft in fact maniac digger is a better game in terms of graphics... Its free and open source and is a project developed by the public.

And since when do graphics actually make a game good? Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's a bad game. Do I think CoD, and most other FPS out there are boring and cookie-cutters? Sure, that doesn't mean the games aren't good.

Seriously, you people need to learn the difference from OPINION and FACT. Unless you didn't get that far in preschool yet... In that case, I completely understand

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but spending an inordinate amount of time commenting on the page of a game you don't like in order to inform people how much you don't like it just looks like trolling. You have, what, ten comments in this thread now? Each and every one of them says basically the same thing, so perhaps you could stop. Sorry dude, this kind of behavior just makes you look like a ****.

Great that mods can be officially incorporated but as said in other comments, it's worrying that Mojang can take your idea and run with it themselves without any requirement to credit you for it. They mention they're interested in 'buying' the mod IP for good mods, but the wording above pretty much says "Accept the pittance we offer you and smile, or we'll just rip off your idea."

Also, if a server is running DLC (Mod) A, will all users have to buy DLC A before they can join, or will the server license cover all players on the server? Seems like an easy way to fracture the entire Minecraft community by trying to pressure-sell mods in the same way Halo does map packs.

Will there be some form of assessment of mods on the MineMarket? By that I mean will there be a standard to which mods must be made before they can be sold?

I love Minecraft, but I worry implementing mods in this way will kill the game.

I think at this point, a better use of Notch's time would be to build in a server list and the ability to flag servers as FreeBuild, RPG, Survival, PvP, etc on the server list, maybe with a linked list of mods run by the server too.

"We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided by the community."

That is the only thing i dont like, i think it should be the modder's decision to let the mod be implemented in minecraft, and then give the modder credit in minecraft also.

You realise that then updates on minecraft would have to stop entirely, right?
Because every change that he wants to make will have been done (badly or well) in a minecraft mod within the first day, and then he couldn't implement it anymore. How do people not understand this??

The modders create a mod. The team likes the idea. They message the modders, and ask them to use their idea and make it part of the game. The modder's agree/disagree, and if they agree Mojang makes it part of a update, and gives them credit in a "credit's menu"

Yes, except that with this agreement the modders can't 'disagree'.
If they could, any ******* who's quickly made a mod of something could effectively stop all updates in Minecraft involving even the idea or concept of what they've done. Once development of Minecraft stops, then that wont be necessary anymore, but it hasn't even been officially 'released' as a 1.0 yet.
You don't have to go to law school to realise that this would probably mean the end of Minecraft production (Unless Sweden has 'special' laws, but I don't think so).

i wounder how it will be if people start getting the source code, why could people start paying for minecraft when there will pop up free versions :# i hope they make some mods tools, sounds better and more secure.

I think that mojang still retaining the rights to users mods is a good idea. Mojang isn't just gonna go out and steal peoples mod ideas. They would most likely ask the modders, and maybe pay them, even let them maintain that section of the game.
Imaginary Example 1: The Aether mod is completed. Mojang likes it so much that they ask the modders if they can add it to the game. Mojang gives the modders some money, and if Notch sees fit, he lets them maintain that part of the game.
Imaginary Example 2: Steve the greedy modder comes out with a bugfix for a major bug in the last update. Notch asks Steve if he can use the mod. Steve says no, but if Mojang didn't have rights to the mod, they wouldn't be able to maintain the mod.

It's probably moreso a "we don't want to have any problems if we come out with a feature already implemented by a mod." They aren't going go around just stealing peoples mods.